Starseers: Fallen Empire, Book 3 (16 page)

Seeing him in such pain, seeing him being bullied, made Alisa want to cry. And to rage. She struggled again against the invisible bonds that held her, longing to lash out, to shoot these cruel idiots.

“Because if that’s the case, Captain,” the old man said, “you’re responsible for his actions and just as much to blame for this murder as he is.”

Alisa looked toward the huge bloodstain. She did not see a body anywhere in the room. Had someone gone out the hole in the wall? She didn’t understand fully what had happened or how Leonidas had ended up in a brawl with someone here. His grenade launcher and blazer pistols were on the floor near the stain, too far away for him to reach now, but nobody else’s weapons were there, no sign of torn robes or coins that might have fallen out in a scuffle. There was just the blood.

“It’s not a military ship, Osmond,” someone said dryly. “She can’t be held responsible for a civilian employee going crazy.”

“Of course she can,” the old man snapped.

“He doesn’t work for her,” Alejandro said, meeting her gaze across the intervening Starseers. “She’s lying. We’re just passengers.”

More of the Starseers were focused on her now, her and Alejandro and the old man. In her peripheral vision, Alisa saw Leonidas’s fingers inching toward his opposite arm, toward some small panel in his armor. She immediately tried to think of something else, afraid someone monitoring her thoughts would notice her noticing his slight actions.

“Passengers that paid their fare,” Alisa said, filling her mind with images of the
Nomad
and her passenger cabins. “I aim to get them to their destination.”

No need to mention that this technically
was
their destination and that nobody had made arrangements for further passage. She hadn’t even made plans as to where she intended to go after this.

“Then it’s a shame your
passenger
chose to murder one of our people,” the old man said, shifting his attention back to Leonidas.

“He didn’t,” Alisa cried, though she had no way of knowing that. She hoped to give Leonidas the few more seconds he needed to do whatever he was trying to do.

The old man frowned at her, but lifted his hand and stepped toward Leonidas.

Leonidas flicked something toward the Starseers, a thimble-sized canister that started spewing bluish-gray smoke as soon as it rolled across the carpet. The powerful stuff had an immediate impact. Horrible smoke curled down Alisa’s throat and into her nostrils, feeling like acid burning away her cilia. Tears streamed from her eyes.

The Starseers stumbled back, and the man holding her let her go. The invisible force wrapped around her also disappeared. Coughs filled the air all around her as the smoke thickened.

Alisa tried to stumble toward Leonidas, even though she could no longer see him in the dense haze, but she was too busy choking on snot and heaving, feeling like her body was trying to cough her lungs out into a pile on the carpet.

A hard arm went around her, and she found herself flung across someone’s shoulder. Leonidas?

As she was swept away from the smoke, her mind filled with an image of those docking clamps under her ship. How would they get away if Mica hadn’t found a way to deal with them yet? How would they get away even if she had? Wouldn’t the Starseers cause them to crash in the mists again?

Leonidas charged for the doors of the library, pushing robed men to the side, men clutching their noses and mouths, snot all over their fingers. They were too distracted by their own discomfort to stop him. He raced through the doorway into air that was thankfully clear of smoke.

Alisa expected him to keep going, to run down the stairs and all the way back to the ship. But he halted before starting down. Being draped over his shoulder limited her view, and she twisted, trying to see around his broad torso. She saw just enough to make her stomach sink.

Lady Naidoo stood at the bottom of the stairs with Young-hee at her side and six Starseer warriors lined up behind her, some with their staffs raised, others with plain blazers pointed at Leonidas. Naidoo herself held the tip of her staff toward him, and energy seemed to crackle in the air around it as the runes carved into the side glowed fiercely.

From the very still way that Leonidas stood, not even seeming to breathe, Alisa feared that he was being restrained by their power again. She wished he had simply run out without stopping to grab her. Maybe he would have made it farther alone. Though where he could have gone from here, she did not know.

“Take them to the prison area,” Naidoo said, lowering her staff.

Leonidas sighed, shifting his weight. He must have been released so he could walk. He did not attempt to fight again.

Other robed figures stumbled out of the library and onto the landing, some coughing, some throwing up. The old man leaned over the railing and heaved his breakfast onto the floor beside the stairs. Alisa felt a modicum of satisfaction at seeing his discomfort, but it did not last long. Someone lifted her from Leonidas’s shoulder, and robed warriors swarmed all around them. She was thrown over someone else’s shoulder like a sack of flour.

If you fight me, I will make this walk unpleasant for you
, an unfamiliar voice spoke into her mind.

“I’m gagging on my own snot, and my eyes feel like they’re being clawed out by acid,” Alisa said, her voice raspy. How much more unpleasant could it get?

She did not, however, try to wriggle free or fight her captor as she was carried down the stairs. With so many enemies around—yes, she had to consider these people enemies now—what was the point?

Chapter 11

Alisa was not surprised that the theme of ice ceilings and floors continued in the basement dungeon where she and Leonidas were dropped off. They were deposited in adjoining cells with translucent forcefields on all sides acting as walls to separate them and keep them from escaping. The cells themselves were part of a block of similar cells in the center of a large room that was also used for storage. Casks of wine and beer and sake were stacked against a back wall. Alas, nobody saw fit to roll one into Alisa’s cell. She could have used a stiff drink.

Once the forcefields were up, the Starseers that had walked their prisoners down en masse all left. A camera on a wall near the bottom of the stairs was turned toward the cells. Alisa did not see any obvious way to escape unless she could dig a hole in the ice floor. Unfortunately, the Starseers had searched her and removed her weapons and multitool. Unless she could dig her way out with her teeth, the odds did not look good. They had also forced Leonidas out of his combat armor, leaving him in nothing more than the underwear and thin T-shirt he wore underneath.

Alisa smiled without humor, thinking of the times she had been imagining him scantily clad in order to distract the Starseers poking in her mind. This was not how she had envisioned seeing him. Blood crusted his face and the sides of his neck from where it had run out of his ears, nose, and mouth, and large bruises mottled the skin on his arms and legs, probably on his torso under his shirt too. Somehow, the Starseers had injured him badly, even with his armor covering him. Armor was designed to defeat weapons, not mental attacks.

She watched Leonidas through the forcefield, wishing she could offer him a hug. She also wanted to ask him what had happened, but he was still sitting on the floor where they had deposited him, his shoulders slumped, his chin to his chest. He looked like he wanted to curl onto his side and pass out. It was probably only the chill of the ice under his butt that kept him from pressing more skin against it. There were no carpets here in the basement to alleviate the cold, and there wasn’t any furniture in the cells, not even a pot for going to the bathroom. Not that Alisa would want to do that in front of Leonidas or the camera.

“Are you going to be all right?” Alisa asked softly.

She did not want to bother him, but she did want to know what had happened and if she should be yelling at that camera, pleading for Alejandro or some other doctor to be sent to attend to him. Wherever Alejandro was. The Starseers must have decided he was not enough of a threat that he needed to be locked up.

“You shouldn’t have been thrown in here with me,” he mumbled, his chin still to his chest. He definitely sounded like he was in pain, like it hurt just to breathe. Had they broken some of his ribs?

“What can I say? I missed your company. Drugging Yumi’s family wasn’t as fun as I thought it would be.”

He turned his head, looking at her for the first time. “Is that inappropriate humor or did you actually do that?”

“Yes, and yes.” She managed a smile for him, even though his face looked as bad as the rest of him, and she wanted to break into tears. His strong features were bruised, his lips split and swollen, and his eyes so dark and puffy that she was surprised he could see out of them. “I don’t know if it will help anything, but if it doesn’t hurt too much, I’d appreciate it if you told me what happened.”

“Hells if I know.”

She frowned. What did that mean? He’d been there, hadn’t he?

“In the beginning, I watched over the doctor’s shoulder as he researched, and I tried to give him ideas. I thought he might want to investigate old Starseer nursery rhymes since that seemed to be what Yumi had remembered and used to find this place. He told me to go away and stop bugging him.” He paused and took in a slow, deep breath before continuing. “So I wandered through the library, poking into books about the history of the Starseers and some of the artifacts they had created, though my attempt at research was handicapped by the fact that the doctor still hasn’t confided in me about what exactly that orb is or what it’s supposed to lead him to—he’s given the impression that it’s a map or a puzzle, but that’s it.”

Alisa almost opened her mouth to agree with that assessment, but couldn’t remember if she had learned that information during one of the times she had been eavesdropping on Alejandro and Leonidas. She did not want to confess to that.

“I asked my guard what he thought it was,” Leonidas said, “but he wasn’t talking.”

“Your guard being Abelardus?”

“Yes. He chose to follow me around the library, glaring at the back of my head instead of staying with the doctor. Maybe he thought I was going to leave graffiti on the walls.”

“You do have the look of a delinquent.”

His eyebrows rose. “Really, Captain.”

“Alisa.”

“I’m supposed to call you by first name when you’re calling me a delinquent?”

“You’re supposed to always call me by first name.” She smiled at him. “What happened to Abelardus?”

Leonidas took another deep breath, but it turned into a round of coughs. He winced and rotated his face away from her, as if he did not want her to see that he was in pain. She bit her lip, again wishing she could go over there and wrap her arms around him. It would not do anything to alleviate his pain, but maybe he would find human contact comforting.

Leonidas wiped his mouth and turned his face back toward her. She swallowed when she saw the fresh blood on the back of his hand. Three suns, he needed a regeneration tank, not a prison cell.

“I was reading some old scrolls when Abelardus left. He’d been at the head of the aisle, keeping a close eye on me. I assumed he was going to check on the doctor. About ten minutes passed with nothing happening. I heard people coming in and out of the library, of course, but Abelardus did not return. Then I heard the sound of breaking glass—real made-out-of-sand-and-breakable glass, not glastica. Even though I could tell it had happened in a different part of the library from where the doctor was researching, I ran to look. The window, the one where you saw that hole in the wall, was completely smashed open, most of the glass knocked out. There was blood all over the carpet. You saw that.”

Alisa nodded, the first uneasy inkling entering her mind that Leonidas had been set up.

“I looked out the window—that tower hangs out over the parapet—and down to the ice. There was a big hole in the ice with blood smeared on the side.”

“Wait a minute.” Alisa held up her hand. “A hole in ice that is so thick that the
Nomad
crashed onto it and didn’t fall through?”

“The White Dragon ship fell through.”

“After you caused a huge
explosion
inside of it.”

“The ice isn’t uniformly thick over the water.”

“Leonidas, nobody fell out of that window and broke through that ice. You’ve been set up.”

He sighed. “I suspect that, too, yes. I pointed out the lack of a body to the first Starseers who ran in and started shouting murder accusations at me. They weren’t interested in listening to me. I realized someone might want to get me out of the way so it would be easier to take the doctor’s artifact. Or maybe someone wanted me out of the way just because he or she had a grudge against cyborgs.”

Alisa grimaced in sympathy. The more she traveled the system with Leonidas, the more she had seen that his kind were either feared or hated. It had made sense for the Alliance to fear cyborg soldiers, after the numerous encounters they had lost to the powerful warriors, but even former loyal imperial subjects seemed uncomfortable around him. Even his own family apparently was.

“As I said, they refused to listen to me. It didn’t help that…” Leonidas glanced over, almost looking embarrassed.

“That what? Can’t they see into your mind? They should be able to see that you didn’t do anything, right?”

“They see what they want to see, like anyone else. And… I
did
get into an altercation with Abelardus on the way to the library. There were numerous witnesses, and Alejandro had to shout in my ear to get me to let go.”

“Why? Was he trying to strangle you or hurt you with his mind?”

“Not exactly.” Leonidas sighed again and lay back on the ice, grimacing as he settled his body. One hand cupped the side of his ribcage. “He was invading my mind, sifting through my memories, and using them to taunt me.”

“To taunt you? You couldn’t… I mean, I’m nobody to judge, since I’ve been known to unleash my tongue at people who irk me, but I thought you were more mature than I am.” Alisa imagined Leonidas getting tired of dealing with insults and whirling to attack Abelardus. In front of witnesses who wouldn’t have heard the insults if they were delivered mentally. They must have been some serious insults.